ML187558651

Age

Not specified

Sex

Not specified

Observation details

photographed and identified by Tim Inskipp I believe this is a Sykes’s Nightjar. The general pale buffish colouration of the underparts fits that species well and is wrong for most other species except Egyptian, which has no white in the wings. Gurpartap Singh’s suggestion that ‘White is not absent from the tail of Sykes's Nightjar. Male has large white tail-corners and female has a bit smaller and buffish’ is not entirely correct. Holyoak (2001, Nightjars and their allies) states ‘R [= rectrix] 4 and R5 with broad (3.0-3.5 cm) white tips (these often suffused buff apically and on outer webs)’. This means that the white may not be visible in flight when the tail is closed and http://orientalbirdimages.org/search.php?Bird_ID=575&Bird_Image_ID=72597 illustrates this with a bird in flight showing no white in the tail. Though this bird is labelled a female it is clearly a male, having white patches on 4 outer primaries, as opposed to females, which have pale patches (rufous-buff in most birds) on 3 outer primaries. Note that the bird under discussion here is also a male because there are 4 white patches in the outer primaries. The suggestion of female or immature Savanna Nightjar cannot be correct because, apart from the darker underparts, the patches in the wing are ‘cinnamon to rufous’, not white in females, and immature males (as in adult males) would have only 3 visible white patches in the wing. Gurpartap Singh’s suggestion that ‘Known distribution also doesn't support Sykes's’ is not very helpful because the nearest known record is only 180 km south of Akhnoor at Harike, Punjab, so it would only be a minor range extension. Also, if you followed that argument logically it would be very difficult to get any new range extensions accepted for sight records because being out of range would prejudice all such records.

Technical information

Dimensions

2880 pixels x 1920 pixels

Original file size

2.4 MB